Taking online classes during COVID at 3 a.m. India-time may not have been the ideal first-year experience, but it didn’t deter Aashna Kulshreshtha from enthusiastically pursuing her undergraduate degree in art history.

Born and raised in New Dehli, Aashna finished high school at an international boarding school in Uttarakhand, India, before initially enrolling at university in Rome. Unfortunately, she found that art history program to be excessively Eurocentric (and somewhat racist), which didn’t particularly match her own interests.

“We spent months on Italy and France, but only did a week on India and Mexico, which were clearly not so important from their perspective,” she recalls. “We weren’t even going to be tested on them!”

Attracted by the buzz around UVic’s AHVS

Unimpressed with Rome, Aashna was instead attracted by the buzz around UVic’s Department of Art History & Visual Studies, which offered a far more international approach to the field . . . despite Victoria being significantly smaller than either New Dehli (population 33 million) or Rome (4.3 million).

“Going to school in Rome prepared me to be in a culture that wasn’t India, but it also meant I’ve always been a third-culture kid everywhere I’ve gone,” she admits with a quick laugh. “So yeah, I had a bit of culture shock when I came here, but I don’t know from which culture.”

Rather than the excessive focus on big movements (Baroque, Renaissance), Aashna has been energized by UVic’s more global approach.

“I was just so surprised to see the amount of diversity here and the focus on Indigenous cultures, which had never even been brought up before in other places,” she says. “UVic is a great place to study art history because the people here will support you and believe in you and are there to help you get your work done. Every day I found people in the department who would tell me what I could do with my degree, what they’ve done with it . . . honesty, that open dialogue has been the most important thing for me.”

Learning core skills through workstudy

Like many UVic students, Aashna spent her off-hours at campus hotspots like Cinecenta, Felicita’s and the School of Music’s free concert series, but her favourite part was time spent as a paid workstudy student in the AHVS Visual Resources Collection. “Working here, you kind of get to see your degree in action before you even finish it,” she says. “I’ve learned so much about how to archive and research properly doing this job.”

Aashna’s responsibilities include scanning images from books required by the AHVS faculty members, researching online  gallery and museum collections, and updating the department’s database. “It’s a big responsibility to keep the database updated,” she explains. “Since we’re talking about India, for example, there’s a city called Kolkata but the British name for it was Calcutta—so we’ve been changing that in the database. It takes a lot of data entry just to keep up to date with global events. I’ve also gotten to know so many of the professors and staff up close, which has been nice because a lot of my degree was online during COVID so I felt like I didn’t know anyone.”

Understanding the world through art history

Yet despite a childhood interest in history, she feels the general attitude in India doesn’t exactly encourage cultural studies.

“It’s all about making money there, and most people feel you can’t really do that with these streams,” she says. “But art history is just a different way to help us understand the world: it’s a more subjective look at a time and allows you to have more introspective conversations with that era. It can also help you find your own identity and—when you see that in a historical sense—it gives you a more holistic approach to past civilizations.”

Indeed, Aashna has been so taken with her studies that, now that’s she’s completed her BA in art history, she’s already been accepted into the AHVS Master’s program for the fall, looking at India’s own vibrant history of art.

“I’m interested in looking at the effects of colonialism on modern Indian art, specifically in the case of women—not only as artists but also subjects and patrons,” she explains. “When we think about the 1800s onwards, it’s so influenced by colonialism; no one in India at that time was making art without the influence of colonialism. Even if they were rejecting it, the art was still in response to what was happening . . . that’s the research I’m wanting to pursue, in a very broad sense.”

Advice for future students

Now that her undergraduate studies are complete, she’s looking forward to her parents coming over from India for her convocation ceremony this spring. But does she have any for future students?

“Get out of your comfort zone and keep an open mind, because what you’re studying can really surprise you. Everyone tells themselves that they already know everything and don’t need any help, but it’s so important to be open to new experiences.”

She pauses and then laughs again. “Um, and keep frozen food handy. There’s no shame in it—you have to eat.”